Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Price of Gold

The landscape of south-eastern Senegal, both geographic and
social, has changed drastically in the past ten years as a gold rush has
brought an influx of people, money, and health and social issues to the
area. Since arriving in my site in May,
I have noticed a tendency of many conversations and interactions to turn to the
subject of gold, and to that of the djouras.

When land was opened up for leasing to Western mining
companies in the early 2000s and the mining explorations proved successful, the
eyes of would-be gold miners across West Africa turned to Senegal. Things really got going as the price of gold
rose, turning what were once tiny unknown villages into boomtowns next to djouras,
illegal small-scale mining sites.
Sambrambougou, the most well-known of these villages, has become a
sprawling shanty town, where Africa meets the Wild West. Gold mining has brought amazing economic
opportunities for a largely agricultural population and infrastructure that
benefits many but is accompanied by social phenomena typical of gold rushes
throughout history. Bandits on motorcycles hold up passing cars on the barely
passable road leading in and out, trafficked Nigerian prostitutes roam the
dusty streets, bamboo shacks serve as motorcycle dealerships where lucky miners
can blow their fortune. Open consumption
of alcohol defies norms of rural life in this Muslim country. And mercury is released into the atmosphere
at a rate one thousand times the safety threshold set by OSHA.

Small-scale artisanal gold mining has become the world’s
largest emitter of mercury, posing health dangers on a global level. At the local level, however, these health
dangers are intensely magnified. The
local practices for the processing of gold are demonstrated in the following
photos, courtesy of David Puhl and Martin Van den Berghe.

After the
ore is dug from a well-like hole, the rock is pounded into small pieces and
then milled to create a fine stone powder.

The miners then use a gravity table, to separate heavier metals,
including gold, from the lighter silica.

The gravity table carpet is then washed in a basin and silt is released;
this silt is then mixed with mercury. Gold and mercury bind together to form an
amalgam that separates from the rest of the silt.

The mercury is then burned
off, leaving the gold, which is sold to a gold buyer and oftentimes exported to
Mali.

The burned-off mercury gas,
meanwhile, is inhaled by both miners and other community members and also settles
on the ground and in the water, creating more pathways for human exposure.

Long-term exposure to methyl mercury can cause issues with
fetal and child development, both mentally and physically. Mercury attacks the nerves, thus damaging
sight, sensation, hearing, and coordination.
The lungs, kidneys, and GI tract are also vulnerable, particularly in
children and pregnant women.

Children playing near a gravity table and pile of tailings which likely contain mercury.

Soon after Patrick and I installed in our site, a Peace Corps
Response Volunteer who had served in our site came back to work specifically on
this issue, having designed an educational program that received funding from
the US Department of State. His
timeframe was limited, and as brand new volunteers, we found ourselves in a
whirlwind of managing what, by Peace Corps standards, is a very big
project.

Our teammate and neighbor, Martin, demonstrates to community health workers how to use a retort, to which they gave the Malinke name "sannijannilango", (literal translation: gold burning thing).

The project, which has come to be known in Peace Corps
Senegal as “The Mercury Project”, has a goal of reducing the potential harm of
mercury in gold mining communities through both formal and informal education
about the dangers of mercury and the introduction of retorts. Retorts are an appropriate technology that
can be produced here in the region of Kedougou that recaptures the mercury
vapor during burning. This greatly
reduces the exposure to methyl mercury and provides an economic benefit as
well. Mercury is expensive (and illegal)
to buy, so the potential for its reuse is a great incentive to use this
technology and benefit the community’s health in the process.

Because of the transient nature of the population in the
mining communities, two baseline surveys that assess the community’s knowledge
and behaviors surrounding mercury will be conducted for the project. The first survey was completed in August 2012,
at the height of the rainy season when many part time miners were farming in
their home villages, and the second survey will be conducted in the height of
the cold, dry mining season, just prior to the full-scale implementation of the
educational project. Following the
baseline survey, our team implemented a pilot educational project, in three
villages, and we are very encouraged by the preliminary results.

Our initial baseline found that 64% of the population in the
mining villages handles mercury and that 64% of these handlers actually burn
mercury. (Practically all gold in
Senegal that is artisanally mined uses mercury in its processing, however, so
these figures are indicative of the percent of community members actually
engaged in gold processing rather than the percentage of gold processing using
mercury.) 96% of burning is done using
an open bowl, allowing all of the vapors to be released. 31.5% of burning takes place inside a hut,
which is the most dangerous practice.
(Another 46.5% of burning occurs in the courtyards of domestic
compounds.) 81.9% burn in the presence
of others. This high prevalence of what
the United Nations Environmental Program deems “worst practices” exists even
though 90.3% of respondents said that they thought that mercury was
dangerous. This may indicate a desire to
protect oneself and one’s community if the means of doing so become
available.

Our educational project is designed to train one Community
Health Worker (CHW) from each village on the dangers of mercury and the use of
retorts as well as other harm-reductive practices. The CHW in turn chooses peer educators from
the village who are trained on these same subjects and how to conduct informal
education. During the three week
program, the CHW gives three health talks and acts as a team leader for the
peer educators, who are each given retorts and instructed to have at least one
conversation about mercury or retorts each day of the program and to act as a
steward of the retorts, making them freely available for use by community
members.

This video shows community health workers role playing an educational exchange regarding mercury and retorts. They were getting into it and taking on different roles, trying to make it more difficult for the person playing the health worker. In this clip, one is deaf and one is a woman. It's a good chance to hear what Malinke sounds like!

During the evaluation meeting for the pilot project, the
peer educators reported that they had in fact typically conducted a higher number of
informal exchanges each day than what was requested of them, and some had used
their retort with community members up to ten times each day. Throughout the three week program, 199
community members were reached through health talks by the Community Health Workers,
4133 informal educational interactions were initiated by peer-to-peer
educators, and retorts provided by our project were used 756 times to burn
amalgam. The biggest reported challenge
was that the retorts did not cool off fast enough to be able to open the
crucible and remove the gold in time to prevent a queue forming; this was a
problem because the large numbers of people who had come to use the retort did
not want to wait. (If that’s the biggest
issue with our program, I’ll take it!) Health workers recounted several
anecdotes of behavior change surrounding the use of mercury, as a result of
both the economic and health benefits of the retort technology. The positivity of this meeting showed great
promise for the full scale project, which will take place in January and
February in eight mining villages.

After rolling out the full-scale educational project, our
next steps as a team are to work to develop both the supply and demand of the
retort technology in order to support a sustainable market-driven supply chain. Additionally, we are hoping to engage
volunteers in the Community Economic Development sector to work with miners to
form associations that will legitimize miners’ work and help to regulate the
activities in the mining sites, creating healthier communities and empowering them to really benefit from the economic opportunities available through mining. Since nearly all of the health issues in
Senegal are exacerbated in the mining areas, there is much work to be done here
in Wild West Africa.

Another thing we worked on while Chris Brown (real name), the Peace Corps Response Volunteer was here, was a mural project done in cooperation with the local high school as part of what will eventually be a broader campaign to encourage students to stay in school rather than dropping out to mine.

"My future shines brighter than gold". I had come up with that slogan for this mural project but hadn't pursued it since i have zero artistic ability. And then Chris came for the mercury project and turned out to be a great artist as well!

We worked with school administration to design this part of the mural, which shows students faced with two choices: the mines or other career opportunities available through education.